Keeping Up with the Top of the Lux 299 Leaderboard

Our clients frequently ask what emerging technologies should be on their radars – and to help answer that on a continuous basis, we recently launched ourLux 299 Top Innovations leaderboard. However, knowing the list’s contents and order is just the first step. An even more important aspect is the insight on what is happening in each of these top innovations. Here, we highlight recent, important changes that continue to shake up these top innovations, as captured by our analysts on the Lux Research platform:

Fake 5G risks consumer confusion and disillusionment about the technology before it even really hits the shelves: Long-term, we are excited about 5G. It will be critical for the internet of things uses, thanks to higher transfer rates, lower latencies, efficient battery consumption, higher signal reliability, and support for more simultaneously connected devices. But, standards and rollout may be painful, and partnerships and product launches are still needed. Not helping things at all is the recent trend of fake5G, where companies simply rebrand today’s LTE Advanced networks as 5G variants. This is risky, as losing consumer and investor support will endanger the 5G rollouts.

Port of Singapore launches bill of lading blockchain in an interesting real-world test for the much-hyped technology: Despite blockchain’s potential advantages via its inherent security, data integrity, and decentralized nature, the early days of enterprise use reek of a technology seeking a problem. We have been carefully watching for meaningful use cases in the real world, and are tracking this Singapore-based project with interest. The idea is to use blockchain for electronic bills of lading for tracking a shipment of containers. It represents a scale-up by Pacific International Lines and the Port of Singapore, expanding an initial pilot to the entire portin a project called TradeTrust. The ambitious goal is to cut the processing and administration costs of a shipping container by 20%.

Google spin-out Verily’s patent on predictive healthcare records using deep learning points to an intriguing use of machine learning:The digitization of health records has been a long-fought battle, with companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google each eyeing opportunities in the space. However, the digital transformation of health records has the opportunity to go further than just a digital copy – it opens up this data to potential insight-extraction, which Verily’s new patent proposes: The company is investigating aggregating and compiling medical data and then using deep learning to warn providers of imminent clinical events. The details will be difficult to get right – from accuracy to privacy to security – and the field of predictive health analytics remains early-stage. Nonetheless, it offers great promise to existing healthcare approaches that need to improve their efficiency and focus.

These three emerging technologies – 5G, blockchain, and deep learning – and their above Q1 2019 highlights will soon be built upon by new developments which our platform and analysts will track. To stay up to date, find your technologies of interest on the Lux 299 leaderboard and follow them by clicking the icon next to each name that interests you – our system will keep you up to date with new developments as they come out.

Our clients frequently ask what emerging technologies should be on their radars – and to help answer that on a continuous basis, we recently launched ourLux 299 Top Innovations leaderboard.